National Affairs: Unthinkable Crime

A U.S. military commission on Guam last week read into the record a
Japanese Army major's confession of cannibalism. Unlike rumored
instances elsewhere, this was no story of starving Japanese eating
their own or enemy dead in an effort to survive. It was ritual
cannibalism practiced on the bodies of U.S. flyers who had been
decapitated after being shot down in the Bonin Islands. The sole
excuse: "war madness."

Though three other officers and ten smaller fry were also on trial,
archvillain of the piece was Major Sueyo Matoba, a slim, mild,
scholarly...